Death is NOT Good Actually

I have in the last decade become a huge Anime fan, now most of the Entertainment media I’m particularly into is Anime or Anime related.  And in my praise of the many things I love about Anime I sometimes go a little too far in making Anime sound morally superior to Western Media.

There are some common moral themes in a lot of Anime I don’t like.  And chief among them is one I noticed being a thing when I watched Manmode’s video on Darling in The FranXX.  Now I am also a bit of an apologist for that show, the common criticisms of it I don’t agree with.  But Manmode correctly observed that one of the morals in this show’s worldbuilding was that Humanity would lose what makes us “Human” if we actually stopped dying.  He also sees this as a common theme in many Trigger/Gainax style shows with it even being awkwardly shoehorned into SSSS.Gridman in one scene in the last episode.

And even beyond those two studios it comes up a lot, though often just in making one villain's individual refusal to accept their own death a root cause of much of their villainy.  And yeah no one disagrees that Zouken Matou in Fate/Stay Night Heaven’s Feel II: Lost Butterfly saying that he would gladly kill everyone else on earth if it would prevent himself from Dying is very Evil. 

But this broader philosophical notion that Humankind needs Mortality to motivate itself isn’t limited to Japanese media of course, it's a theme in the “Christian” world building of Tolkien and Lewis as well, The Elves view Mortality as a Gift that they are envious of..  I put Christian in Quotes there not to deny that those two were Christians, they were, but this aspect of their worldview is AntiChristian, it is the very heart of Paganism going all the way back to the Epic of Gilgamesh.

What separates the New Testament 1 Corinthians 15 Gospel of The Resurrection from the many “dying and rising gods” that Mythiscists obsess over is that for Paul the Resurrection is NOT mere Symbolism, it is other things that are made mere symbols of The Resurrection.  The Gospel is the promise that Death is Temporary, that one day it will not exist any longer.

And the reason I’m still a Young Earth Creationist even though I have no interest in telling anyone they are required to be one to be a “True Christian” is because tied into that is a Belief that Death was not originally a natural part of Life, it’s existence is a consequence of Adam’s Sin, it is a Curse that the Last Adam is liberating us from.

Returning to Anime this is why I am glad there is a counter example.  The Black Moon saga of Sailor Moon (as it was in the Manga and second cour of Sailor Moon Crystal but not the 90s Anime which removed this element of the plot) involves a future where Death has ceased and everyone is now immortal, and the people who think that is a bad thing for exactly the reason Trigger thinks it would be are the villains, and the narrative has no sympathy for their perspective at all, not even the slightest nominal consideration that maybe they have a point.  The reason why this is one of the awkwardly worst Arcs of the 90s Anime is that it tried to make these villains more sympathetic while dropping their motivation.  But in Crystal I love it, I love finally seeing an Anime say FU to this popular Pagan idea.